Editor's Note: This article has been updated for the August 25 print edition of The Justice.

Earlier this summer, Dr. Chad Williams (AAAS), along with Professor Kidada Williams of Wayne State University crowdsourced a list of texts called the #CharlestonSyllabus in response to a recent mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The readings are meant to “provide valuable information about the history of racial violence in this country and contextualize the history of race relations in South Carolina and the United States in general,” according to the African American Intellectual History Society, where the full list is being compiled. Works can be suggested through Twitter using the #CharlestonSyllabus.

In an interview with the Justice, Williams called on professors from across the University’s educational programs to deeply engage with the issues of race relations and racial violence in the United States within their own fields of study, saying that it was a conversation which cannot fall on the African and Afro-American Studies department alone. He also suggested that faculty, students and alumni might try creating a Brandeis-specific version of the Charleston Syllabus which would deal with issues and questions raised by the event that specifically speak to the Brandeis community.

Williams, who is the chair of AAAS, told the Justice in an interview that he hopes the syllabus will be used as “a resource for scholars and educators to teach about the content of the Charleston Massacre.” He wants readers to use it as “an opportunity to educate themselves, but also to contribute to the broader communal dialogue.”

Williams wrote in an article for the AAIHS that he “awoke to a nightmare” on June 18, after learning that nine black men and women had been shot and killed during a bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church the previous night. Upon later learning that the alleged shooter, Dylan Roof, was a white supremacist, Williams writes, he “began to immediately situate Charleston in the long history of white racial terrorism inflicted upon black people from Reconstruction to the present, encompassing assassinations of black community leaders, lynching in [the] name of defending white womanhood and attacks on African American churches.”

Williams writes that he did not feel “confident” in the discourse emerging from the event over the following days, such as “vapid calls for renewing the ‘conversation on race,’ a soothing focus on black forgiveness and ill-informed discussions about the Confederate flag. ... It became painfully evident that the vast majority of people lacked the necessary historical awareness to engage in serious dialogue about Charleston, much less subject themselves to critical introspection.”

Williams told the Justice that he felt the discourse was specifically lacking understanding of “the long history of racial violence and racial terrorism inflicted on African Americans since Reconstruction, the historical significance of the black church through the 19th century, and also the Confederate flag, which has been the focus of much of the media coverage.”

Recalling the #FergusonSyllabus—a collection of research articles and books which was generated on Twitter after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.—Williams tweeted on June 21 that he was “tired of having one-sided conversations. We need people to read a book and educate themselves. #CharlestonSyllabus” He also contacted Marcia Chatelain, the Georgetown University professor who started the Ferguson Syllabus. Williams told the Justice that “she deserves all the credit for inspiring me and all the other scholars who are working on this project” and added that it is important for readers “to look at the two [the Charleston and Ferguson syllabi] in conjunction with each other.”

As of this writing, there are over 375 works on the AAIHS webpage that are part of the Charleston Syllabus. These include general historical overviews of African-American history and political struggles, as well as op-eds and editorials reacting to the shooting and discourse around it. There are also historical and critical readings on South Carolina’s history of slavery and race relations, including a subsection on Charleston specifically; on slavery, including subsections on the U.S. South, the U.S. North and the Atlantic world; on the Civil War and the Confederate Flag; on the post-Reconstruction period and the Jim Crow era, including subsections on racial violence, white racial identity and white supremacy; on race and religion and on the civil rights and black power era. Additionally, the syllabus features sections on African-American creative writers, poets and filmmakers, including Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Danielle Evans, Ntozake Shange, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Spike Lee and Zora Neale Hurston. There is also a section of works for young readers, and a collection of primary source documents from figures such as Absalom Jones, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

When asked how he thought educators should begin conversations with students about the Charleston shooting, Williams said that educators need to recognize that students “are deeply affected” by these events, adding that educators “can’t simply divorce what happened in society at large, and especially in incidents as historically significant as what happened in Charleston, from what we do in the classroom.”

Williams said he saw this event as an opportunity for Brandeis specifically to “embrace our responsibility to talk about the significance of this event and the realities of racism and white supremacy.” He is not aware of any Brandeis students who have contributed works to the syllabus, but again noted the large volume of submissions and encouraged Brandeisians to contribute. Williams added that “what happened in Charleston isn’t going to simply disappear in the next news cycle. We are going to continue to wrestle with this as the trial takes place, as we learn more about what happened that horrific day. The wounds and trauma are going to be with [students], students are going to be bringing those experiences and memories back with them, so we [Brandeis professors] need to be prepared to recognize that and respond to it as well.”